Today's manufacturing industry has become increasingly competitive, especially the automotive industry. In the past, most automotive manufacturing machinery and assembly lines were dedicated to one specific model of automobile so that hundreds of thousands of automobiles could be produced on the same dedicated lines at a relatively inexpensive cost. However, with the advent of numerous automobile manufacturers, the automobile market has forced automobile manufacturers to develop many new and different options of automobiles so as to satisfy all of its customers' demands. The manufacturing and assembly lines that are dedicated to single models of automobiles are inefficient in that they must be retooled and/or replaced upon manufacturing new models of automobiles. In addition, such dedicated manufacturing and assembly lines can lead to excessive downtime, since the entire line must be stopped in order to perform necessary maintenance or repairs. This creates inefficiencies that are undesirable in any industrial environment, not just the automotive industry.
In order to reduce such inefficiencies, it has been necessary to reduce the cost of manufacturing and assembling automobile components by designing flexibility into the machinery such that various components and models can be manufactured from the same machinery. In addition, the machinery must be automated so as to reduce the amount of manual labor that is required to manufacture the automobile components, since labor is a large cost component associated with manufacturing automobiles. By providing flexible and automated machinery to produce various automobile components, the cost of machinery and labor is reduced, thereby reducing the cost associated with manufacturing automobiles.
These same principals apply to the equipment and methods utilized to leak test various components of an automobile, such as cylinder heads, clutches, transmission parts, water and vacuum pumps, and cylinder blocks. Specifically, engine blocks and cylinder heads must be leak tested to ensure that the engine will perform properly when assembled into its final configuration. Leak testing components prior to their assembly into the final product avoids incorporating defective components into the final product and the costs associated with such defective products. By incorporating flexibility into the machinery that performs the leak testing for such components, such as engine blocks and cylinder heads, the cost of manufacturing such components is reduced. Thus, there is a savings in creating less defective components at a lower manufacturing cost by using flexible machinery. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide flexible and automated leak test equipment that could automatically leak test a variety of different automobile components for different engine sizes and different types of automobiles in order to reduce the cost associated with manufacturing such automobiles.